by Mary Balogh
“Not a chance.” Graham strode past him. “The ladies are my sisters, and I protect what is my own.”
With which words, worthy of Freddie Nelson for bad theatrics, he knocked Cornell down with a blow to the chin that would surely have felled an oak.
“Neatly done, lad.” Hugo’s voice was full of admiration.
Ralph looked at his brother-in-law in some astonishment. He could not see his face clearly in the darkness, but his voice sounded a bit sheepish when he spoke again.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose that answers one question. Did I kill him?”
Ralph looked down at Cornell.
“I do not believe dead men moan,” he said. “But it was not for lack of trying, Gray. I should resent you. I wanted the satisfaction of doing that for myself.”
“You had better return to your guests, Ralph, and put to rest any nasty speculation that is going on,” Hugo said. “Though I do not imagine anyone would care to contradict Bewcastle’s explanation about spiders. Have you ever noticed his eyes? Pure silver and straight out of the wilderness. I doubt anyone has ever contradicted him. You go on up too, Muirhead. You do not want murder on your conscience. Not when you are a clergyman. Come on, then, lad. You cannot moan down there all night. Show some backbone. Take my hand and I’ll help you up. I’ll show you off the premises. There will be a door here somewhere, I daresay, leading straight out to the street. It will save you some embarrassment.”
“A word of advice, Cornell,” Ralph said before following Hugo’s advice. “Stay far away from both the Duchess of Worthingham and Mrs. Nelson for the rest of your natural lifetime. I am not sure I will be able to keep the Reverend Muirhead on his leash if you do not.”
Freddie Nelson, he discovered a short time later, was still in the supper room, talking with great animation and flamboyant arm gestures to a small group of captives who looked as though they would far rather be in the ballroom.
Lucy was dancing with Bewcastle and managing to look both triumphant and terrified. Chloe was dancing with George and was smiling brightly and looking across the room at him with anxious eyes.
Ralph winked at her and grinned—and suddenly her smile was so dazzling that it almost knocked him off his feet.
* * *
“Graham did?” Chloe stared at Ralph in disbelief. “Graham?”
She had had no opportunity for the last hour to ask him what had happened, though clearly something had. It had been whispered about the ballroom that Lord Cornell had insulted Lucy in the garden. But the whisperings had not grown into full-blown gossip and perhaps would not. The Duke of Bewcastle, who had escorted Lucy back to the ballroom and then danced with her, had confronted those who were gathered on the balcony with his exquisitely jeweled quizzing glass half raised to his eye, and apparently that glass wielded by that particular nobleman was considered one of the most lethal weapons in the ton. Or so Gwen had whispered in Chloe’s ear, and Chloe could believe it. How the sunny-natured duchess could live with him, Chloe did not know. One well-placed glance from those silver eyes was surely capable of freezing grapes on the vine. Though he had gone to Lucy’s rescue and made up a story about a spider. He was holding one of the duchess’s hands in both his own at the moment, his head bent toward hers while she smiled and talked.
“It was as neat and deadly a blow as I have ever seen,” Ralph said in answer to Chloe’s question. “It was a privilege to witness it, though I must confess I would rather have dealt it myself. Hugo escorted Cornell off the premises. I do not believe he will be troubling either you or your sister again.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But Graham?”
He grinned at her. “Have I told you how lovely you are looking?”
“Am I?” she asked him. “I am not . . . too vivid? Some people might believe I ought to be still in black.”
“My mother is not,” he said, “or my sisters. And you are wearing this particularly bright shade of green at the specific request of my grandmother. I must compliment her on her good taste, by the way. It is perfect. And as for your hair . . . Well, it would seem you are stuck with that color and I am stuck with having to look at it until you turn old and gray.”
“Ouch,” she said.
“I look forward to growing old with you, Chloe,” he said. “In the fullness of time, that is. I look forward to being young with you first and then middle-aged. I look forward to living all my life with you. Promise not to die before me?”
She did not know whether to laugh or cry.
“Only if you promise not to die before me,” she said.
He laughed softly. “We will do all things together, then, will we?” he asked and raised his head to look about the ballroom.
It was very late—or very early, depending upon one’s perspective. Grandmama and Great-Aunt Mary had gone home after supper, and a number of the more elderly guests had left at the same time. But most remained. There was one set left—a waltz. There had been two others during the evening. Chloe had danced the first with Lord Easterly, her uncle, and the second with Viscount Gilly, who had been perfectly agreeable without making any further reference to the relationship between them. And she had watched Ralph dance the first waltz with the Marchioness of Attingsborough and the second with Lucy.
There was one set left.
One waltz.
Then they would see all their guests on their way, send all the servants off to bed rather than insist that they clear up first, pronounce their ball to have been a resounding success despite the unpleasantness with Lord Cornell, and go up to bed themselves. And tomorrow their normal, everyday lives would resume. Ralph had received his Letter of Summons from the Lord Chancellor’s office and would take his seat in the House of Lords next week. At the end of the Season they would go back home to Manville Court and . . .
But she was too weary to think beyond that point. And she was feeling unexpectedly and unaccountably depressed. She was tired, she supposed.
A gentleman whose name had slipped her memory stopped in front of them, exchanged a few remarks with Ralph, and then asked Chloe if she would honor him with her hand for the waltz. Couples were already gathering on the floor.
“Too late, Fotheringham,” Ralph said. “I have already laid claim to the duchess’s hand myself and am not to be persuaded to relinquish it.”
Chloe turned her head to smile at him, her tiredness and her low spirits—and Lord Fotheringham—forgotten.
“The last waltz,” she said.
“At last.” He looked back at her with half-closed eyes. “It is the very devil to be the host of a ball, Chloe, when there is only one lady present with whom one wishes to dance and she happens to be one’s wife. Am I fated to become a dull dog, uninterested in any female company except that of my duchess? It is enough to give anyone the shudders.”
“Are you?” She licked her lips. She was unaccustomed to him in this mood.
“I fear I am.” He smiled slowly at her. “And I fear I will find the last waltz at an end if I do not stop babbling. Come.”
And he took her hand, set it half across his silken cuff, half across the back of his hand, and led her onto the floor to join the other dancers. Lucy, bright eyed and chattering, was gazing up at a lazy-eyed, half-smiling Freddie Nelson, who was giving her his undivided attention. Gwen, one hand on Lord Trentham’s shoulder, the other in his, was laughing at something he was saying. And she managed to dance, Chloe had noticed all evening, despite her heavy limp. Viscountess Ravensberg, her husband’s hand already at her waist, was saying something to the Earl of Kilbourne, who had his countess on his arm—the first wife and the jilted bride and the bridegroom all together on the dance floor, clearly comfortable in one another’s company. Lady Angela Allandale had taken to the floor with the most handsome of the considerable court of admirers who had clustered about her all evening.
And then the orchestra
struck a chord and the music began.
Chloe had felt consciously happy earlier in the evening. She recaptured that mood again as Ralph twirled her into the dance and she followed his lead as though they had always been meant to waltz together. Except that it was not just happiness she felt now. This was . . . oh, this was the happiest moment of her life. Nothing could or would ever be more perfect than this.
Nothing could ever be more perfect than perfect.
She smiled at the thought as she listened to the music, to the slight thumping of feet and swish of silks, as she watched the colors of gowns swirl past and the glitter of jewels and the sparkle of candles. The smell of flowers and greenery was heavy on the air. There was a welcome suggestion of coolness from the French windows as they danced past.
No, not quite past.
He danced her out through one set of doors and halfway along the blessed coolness of the deserted balcony. And he stopped and stood looking down into her upturned face without releasing his hold on her.
“I was a debater at school,” he said. “A good one. A persuasive one. I could always find the right words.”
She smiled up at him a little uncertainly. What . . . ?
“I always spoke from the heart rather than from a script as the other boys did,” he said. “It worked for me. I spoke with passion.”
She raised her eyebrows. Was she supposed to know . . . ?
“I cannot think of a blessed word to say,” he said.
And she understood. Oh, yes, in a great upsurge of joy, she understood.
“Except I love you,” he said. “Ridiculous, meaningless words. Clichéd. Inadequate. Embarrassing. The trouble is, Chloe—”
She raised one hand and set her fingertips over his lips.
“But they are the most beautiful words in the English language when strung together,” she said. “Listen to them. I love you. I love you, Ralph.”
He frowned. “If you think I was angling—”
She replaced her fingers.
“I do not,” she said. “You perhaps think I am still clinging to the terms of our bargain—no emotional bond, or something like that. I was an idiot. So were you. I love you. And now you have to say it to me or I will dash off into the darkness in my embarrassment and never reemerge. Oh, don’t stand there staring at me as though I had grown an extra head. Now I feel such a prize—mmmm.”
His mouth had stopped her.
And then he was gazing down at her again in the near darkness.
“You are the most precious thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.
She feathered her fingers lightly along his facial scar and smiled.
“I think,” she said, “we had better return to our guests. Besides, I have longed all evening to waltz with you. I would hate now to waste the chance.”
He looked boyish and handsome and altogether gorgeous when he smiled full on. She would never tire of that expression, she thought, as he kissed her swiftly once more and twirled her along the rest of the balcony and through the other set of French windows to join their family and friends and peers.
She would never tire of him. Of this. Of this marriage and this life and this love that by some miracle they shared.
He was still smiling at her as though there were no one else but her in the ballroom.
“I will waltz with you all my life, Chloe,” he said. “I promise.”
“A foolish admission.” Chloe laughed. “I shall hold you to it.”
Read on for a look at the next book in the Survivors’ Club series by Mary Balogh,
ONLY A KISS
Available from Signet in September 2015.
Imogen Hayes, Lady Barclay, was on her way home to Hardford Hall from the village of Porthdare two miles away. Usually she rode the distance or drove herself in the gig, but today she had decided she needed exercise. She had walked down to the village along the side of the road, but she had chosen to take the cliff path on the return. It would add an extra half mile or so to the distance, and the climb up from the river valley in which the village was situated was considerably steeper than the more gradual slope of the road. But she actually enjoyed the pull on her leg muscles and the unobstructed views out over the sea to her right and back behind her to the lower village with its fishermen’s cottages clustered about the estuary and the boats bobbing on its waters.
She enjoyed the mournful cry of the seagulls, which weaved and dipped both above and below her. She loved the wildness of the gorse bushes that grew in profusion all around her. The wind was cold and cut into her even though it was at her back, but she loved the wild sound and the salt smell of it and the deepened sense of solitude it brought. She held on to the edges of her winter cloak with gloved hands. Her nose and her cheeks were probably scarlet and shining like beacons.
She had been visiting her friend Tilly Wenzel, whom she had not seen since before Christmas, which she had spent along with January at her brother’s house, her childhood home, twenty miles to the northeast. There had been a new niece to admire as well as three nephews to fuss over. She had enjoyed those weeks, but she was unaccustomed to noise and bustle and the incessant obligation to be sociable. She was used to living alone, though she had never allowed herself to be a hermit.
Mr. Wenzel, Tilly’s brother, had offered to convey her home, pointing out that the return journey was all uphill and rather steeply uphill in parts. She had declined, using as an excuse that she really ought to call in upon elderly Mrs. Park, who was confined to her house since she had recently fallen and badly bruised her hip. Making that call, of course, had meant sitting for all of forty minutes, listening to every grisly detail of the mishap. But elderly people were sometimes lonely, Imogen understood, and forty minutes of her time was not any really great sacrifice. And if she had allowed Mr. Wenzel to drive her home, he would have reminisced as he always did about his boyhood days with Dicky, Imogen’s late husband, and then he would have edged his way into the usual awkward gallantries to her.
Imogen stopped to catch her breath when she was above the valley and the cliff path leveled off a bit along the plateau above it, though it still sloped gradually upward in the direction of the stone wall that surrounded the park about Hardford Hall on three sides—the cliffs and the sea formed the fourth side. She turned to look downward while the wind whipped at the brim of her bonnet and fairly snatched her breath away. Her fingers tingled inside her gloves. Gray sky stretched overhead, and the gray foam-flecked sea stretched below. Gray rocky cliffs fell steeply from just beyond the edge of the path. Grayness was everywhere. Even her cloak was gray.
For a moment her mood threatened to follow suit. But she shook her head firmly and continued on her way. She would not give in to depression. It was a battle she often fought, and she had not lost yet.
Besides, there was the annual visit to Penderris Hall, thirty-five miles away on the eastern side of Cornwall, to look forward to next month, really quite soon now. It was owned by George Crabbe, Duke of Stanbrook, a second cousin of her mother’s and one of her dearest friends in this world—one of six such friends. Together, the seven of them formed the self-styled Survivors’ Club. They had once spent three years together at Penderris, all of them suffering the effects of various wounds sustained during the Napoleonic Wars, though not all those wounds had been physical. Her own had not been. Her husband had been killed while in captivity and under torture in Portugal, and she had been there and witnessed his suffering. She had been released from captivity after his death, actually returned to the regiment with full pomp and courtesy by a French colonel under a flag of truce. But she had not been spared.
After the three years at Penderris, they had gone their separate ways, the seven of them, except George, of course, who had already been at home. But they had agreed to gather again each year for three weeks in the early spring. Last year they had gone to Middlebury Park in Glouceste
rshire, which was Vincent, Viscount Darleigh’s home, because his wife had just delivered their first child and he was unwilling to leave either of them. This year, for the fifth such reunion, they were going back to Penderris. But those weeks, wherever they were spent, were by far Imogen’s favorite of the whole year. She always hated to leave, though she never showed the others quite how much. She loved them totally and unconditionally, those six men. There was no sexual component to her love, attractive as they all were, without exception. She had met them at a time when the idea of such attraction was out of the question. So instead she had grown to adore them. They were her friends, her comrades, her brothers, her very heart and soul.
She brushed a tear from one cheek with an impatient hand as she walked on. Just a few more weeks to wait . . .
She climbed over the stile that separated the public path from its private continuation within the park. There it forked into two branches and by sheer habit she took the one to the right, the one that led to her house rather than to the main hall. It was the dower house in the southwest corner of the park, close to the cliffs but in a dip of land and sheltered from the worst of the winds by high, jutting rocks that more than half surrounded it, like a horseshoe. She had asked if she might live there after she came back from those three years at Penderris. She had been fond of Dicky’s father, the Earl of Hardford, indolent though he was, and very fond of Aunt Lavinia, his spinster sister, who had lived at Hardford all her life. But Imogen had been unable to face the prospect of living in the hall with them.
Her father-in-law had not been at all happy with her request. The dower house had been neglected for a long time, he had protested, and was barely habitable. But there was nothing wrong with it as far as Imogen could see that a good scrub and airing would not put right, though even then the roof had not been at its best. It was only after the earl was all out of excuses and gave in to her pleadings that Imogen learned the true reason for his reluctance. The cellar at the dower house had been in regular use as a storage place for smuggled goods. The earl was partial to his French brandy and presumably was kept well supplied at a very low cost, or perhaps no cost at all, by a gang of smugglers grateful to him for allowing their operations in the area.